"REST" entries

The Web’s flexibility has helped it to survive and thrive, pushing well beyond the browser-based universe where it first showed its promise. While I’ve spent most of my time working with the HTML/CSS/JavaScript side, the HTTP side of the original HTML+HTTP combination that built the Web is perhaps even more flexible.

I enjoyed talking with Mike Amundsen, Principal API Architect at Layer 7 Technologies, who has spent much of his recent career encouraging enterprise customers to shift toward web architectures. While REST has emerged over the past decade to eclipse SOAP-based “web services”, Amundsen has eagerly promoted the next step beyond the simple CRUD-based model of early REST work: hypermedia.

Our conversation ranged from the history and foundations of REST through the many ways to integrate that work with existing enterprise practice to a glimpse at what the future might hold for frameworks, design, and architecture.

• REST as enterprise architectures principles applied to hypermedia (at 1:57)
• Transitioning from RPC-based models to hypermedia, by including additional information in response. (at 3:00)
• The value of opinionated message formats and eventual integration into opinionated frameworks. (at 5:51)
• Shifting from shared understandings of object models to messages. (at 8:50)
• “Enough coupling, but not too much” to allow mixing of technologies. (at 11:15)
• Human negotiation, HTTP negotiation, and responsive web design (at 14:20)

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